spectra
by kintsugii
Summary: A wormhole opens up over San Francisco, releasing a terrifying beast that devours half the city without blinking an eye. Animals around the world start mutating into monstrosities. In fifteen years, in hushed voices, the survivors will call these creatures "pokemon". This is the story of the morning the world ended, and all the mornings that came after that.
1. red

**.**

* * *

 **red**

* * *

"Fuck this. A handful of MK-16's and some biowaste containment device. Screw the payment—Turner can take his orders and go fuck himself; it's not worth it."

"Don't forget the pallet of baked beans," Mira said wearily, shifting in her seat and letting her right hand stray up to the truck's window while her other hand absent-mindedly rubbed at her elbow. "He was _very_ particular that all those arrive in one piece."

"I hope he shits himself to death from them." Wren scowled, leaning over the steering wheel to look at the sky ahead. Grey skies and clouds as far as the eye could see. Good. The rain would keep the wolves away, at least until dark came.

"But he does pay well."

Wren snorted. "He's got us driving through feral heartland, through two government roadblocks, and into the middle of Skull territory because he couldn't be assed to organize a supply run any earlier." It was hard not to let the frustration slip into her voice. "He better pay well for that. How did we end up working for an idiot who's barely thirty and _still_ doesn't have his life together?"

Mira stopped twirling a lock of brown hair around her index finger to squint out the window, where pine trees were smearing by at breakneck speed. "I think there might be an alpha out there," she said mildly, one hand straying down beneath the glovebox, before she sat straight up as if struck by lightning. "What day is it?" she asked, suddenly rifling through a stack of papers on the dashboard of the beat-up pickup truck.

"No idea," Wren muttered, looking up for a moment to glance into the rear-view mirror. No sign of Skull vehicles yet, but that didn't mean that they weren't being watched. "Why do you care?"

"I didn't look too hard last night, but it might be a full moon."

Wren's eyes widened. "Son of a _shit_." She'd driven between San Diego and Seattle half a million times during her undergrad—countless road trips with Mira and the squad, visiting home, looking at med schools—but that had been forever ago. And never once on all of those miles travelled had she imagined that she'd retrace her footsteps fearing _werewolves_. "Hopefully they'll be scared of the rain and they'll stay in their holes."

"We can probably handle it." Even as she reached down to stroke the armored head resting on the gearshift, Mira didn't sound certain. The chimera gurgled back at her, its eyes barely visible through the slits in its wooden helmet, and Wren could've sworn she'd heard a fishlike thump a couple of times against the truck's cracking seats as the creature wagged its tail. "I can't believe Turner's letting us take a chimera on a run this long."

" _I_ can't believe you've got a chimera on the floor of my truck acting like a little puppy," Wren shot back. "Did you _see_ what one of the other ugly shits did to that bear in the testing ring? There's a reason we're supposed to keep it in the back with the rest of the cargo. It—" Wren cut herself short as the tail stopped wagging and the chimera's head rose up. Mismatched jaundiced eyes that seemed to glow with a fire of their own pierced through the wooden helmet to glare at her.

"Easy, Dodger," Mira murmured, petting the creature's crest reassuringly, which seemed to calm it a little. "Wren doesn't mean it." And then, to Wren: "You aren't looking at scars right if you think they're ugly."

"You named the chimera that's specifically bred to hunt out and kill ferals 'Dodger'? That's a little fucked up."

Mira smoothed a chunk of dried blood out from between the chimera's otherwise-pristine, slate-grey fur and flicked it out the window. "My family used to have dobermans back before things fell apart," she said matter-of-factly, now scratching the chimera beneath the chin, in the gap between helmet and fur. "Xavier used to name all of them Dodger. Four in total, one after another. I don't think he'll mind adding a fifth."

"Your brother is literally the least-creative person I've ever met, except maybe you."

Mira shrugged. "It runs in the family, I guess. Dodger's a good name, though. Isn't that right, Dodger?"

Wren couldn't help but stare as the scientifically-engineered killing machine affectionately rubbed its head against Mira's palm until she let it nuzzle a cheerio from between her fingers.

While not entirely unwelcome, this was _certainly_ not how she'd seen herself spending her life a year ago. On one hand, it all felt so normal now: she and Mira were casually smuggling contraband across state borders, safe in the knowledge that Turner had already padded enough pockets to guarantee them safe passage through the quarantine zones. Dodger could take out the monsters that bothered them, and Wren was there for the humans. Their first job had been a trainwreck of nerves and early mistakes, but now here they were, clipping through feral heartland at a hundred twenty miles per hour, with only wolves that were too afraid of the rain.

On the other hand, an entire future had been obliterated. Plans of residency, and then neurosurgery at Sacramento General, had all gone out the window when the first rift had opened. _Masshibun_ had been the name given to the scaly, ungodly behemoth that had surfaced on the beaches of San Diego with no warning, a roiling mass of muscles intent on devouring and destroying all in its path. Wren still remembered the feeling of every hair on her body standing on end, the foul stench of bile and rot filling the air, and then the screams as the thing ripped a building in half with bloodred arms five times as thick as her body. With every creature it killed, it grew in size, devouring and devouring and devouring, and there hadn't been time to think, just the fuzzy sense of fear as—

"Eyes on the road, Big Bird," Mira said, glancing up from fiddling with the dashboard radio, which was unhelpfully spluttering grey noise. "At this speed, I don't think we'd appreciate meeting any of the trees."

It hadn't been the first day that hurt them the most. "I thought that nickname was going to stay dead." Wren tilted the wheel back to the left, so that they were safely in the center of the road. It wasn't like there were any cars coming in the other direction anyway.

"Are you kidding? It's the only clever thing I've done," Mira said, smirking. "Do you think I'm going to let the slow decline of society into anarchy cover that up?"

Wren sighed. Fair enough. Mira always had a protective streak for her ideas. "Anything useful on the radio?"

"Nothing you'd want to hear," Mira muttered darkly, her eyebrows creased into a fierce frown as she fiddled with the knob. "That's odd…"

Wren tore her eyes off the road for half a second, letting Mira's tawny curls fill her vision for that precious moment. "What's up?"

"Even the government channels are clipping in and out." Mira moved back for a moment, staring at the radio, and then hit the dashboard. The quality improved for a moment and then went back to its staticky warbles. "Piece of crap. You should've let me hotwire that car in the junkyard back in Fresno; this one's trash. The minivan I saw looked stupid, but it would've had plenty more legroom."

"And we'd take twice as long to get there because it would barely push seventy miles per hour," Wren shot back with a grin. "Don't forget to drop the kids off at soccer practice while you're away, okay?"

Mira sighed and leaned back, apparently satisfied in having lost her battle with the radio. "It's weird that we can't even get the standard airwaves. I didn't think the rain was that bad, and we're definitely not that far from San Francisco."

"Maybe Watari was right, and San Francisco finally went down." It was easy to say things like that so casually when it was just the two of them, driving through mile after mile of nothingness, the remains of civilization an eternity away. Wren narrowed her eyes as they passed an overgrown highway sign, its chipped reflective paint barely enough to catch the headlights of their dying pickup truck. They still had at least half a day until they got to Seattle.

"I heard the ferals in their area are getting a lot worse. Didn't Watari say that the Bay was practically impassible with all the new stuff that they've been finding in there?"

"Makes sense," Wren said, and flinched at the newest sound before recognizing the arrival of the rain, coming in thick sheets all of a sudden. She fiddled around with the unfamiliar levers beneath the truck's steering wheel before she finally found the windshield wipers. "The Bay was where the first one of the things appeared; it'd make sense if the mutations are happening there faster than anywhere else."

"No, but this is different." Mira let her voice drop a little, as if she were afraid that someone would hear them, sealed as they were in a stolen car rocketing across a deserted highway. "His team was doing research on these giant versions of _ranatra fusca—_ those spiders that walk on water. More than enough differences to be considered a completely different species _—_ you know how much he loves naming these things; he's already named the clade _onishizukumo_ and apparently that's a _hilarious_ pun _._ But these things are huge. Like, three feet big and still in adolescence, and he was convinced that they were manipulating the water currents somehow. And naturally they were preying on the rest of the fish in the area, and sometimes they were going after some of the people still left on the wharfs… it's a little terrifying, honestly. I thought the forests were bad enough, but now that the coasts are going… Enemies on all sides." Pause. "I know it's stupid, but I wish things got back to normal, somehow."

"We'll make it through somehow. We always do," Wren replied nonchalantly, her attention suddenly caught by a streak of blue above them. She sensed rather than heard the chimera's warning growl—that much should've made her stop in her tracks. She craned her neck further beneath the windshield, frowning as she tried to focus on the blur in the clouds. Another mutated bird, probably, but if they drew its attention, there would be hell to pay. "What is that?"

"But there has to be a _limit_ to how far things can fall before we can't pick them up any—"

"FUCK!" The tires screeched as Wren wrenched the steering wheel sharply to the left, sending them skidding sideways as she bodily slammed her weight against the brakes with a cloud of smoke and seared rubber. The knuckles of her left hand tightened against the steering wheel, but her right arm was flying, too slow, to reach out for Mira because she knew it was too late for them to—"Get out, now!"

"Wren, wha—"

Impact.

A giant chunk of stone plowed downward, first into the glistening asphalt and then into the hood of their car. Wren processed it as if from afar, watching while her body was too slow to respond to the way that the aluminum hood splashed like water under the force, the impulse rippling upward as the frame crumpled. Her own momentum carried her serenely and inexorably forward on a perfect trajectory with the shards of glowing shrapnel that split off from the meteor, shattering the windshield. Cracks spiderwebbed across the safety glass, casting dark shadows over the unfurling airbags that were too slow to stop Wren's head from colliding with steering wheel—

Time sped up. Wren's head shot forward, and her arm snapped back, and then shattered glass was raining down around them as her forehead met dashboard.

* * *

Wren awoke to sharp ringing in her ears, the woven fabric of her seatbelt cutting into her sternum like an iron bar. She blinked, trying to force the image into focus, and found a thin trickle of blood kept stubbornly leaking into her vision.

Assess.

Concussion, likely. Her left wrist was crushed beneath her at an odd angle. Fractured, perhaps broken. Minor bruises on the chest area; larger ones developing around the neck and face. The air around them was unnaturally hot, even for the summer.

 _The car had gotten hit with something she had to move before—_

Wren reached for the door handle and then swore with pain as her arm erupted into a cluster of screaming nerves. Wrist was definitely broken. She awkwardly reached around with her right arm and shouldered the door open, stumbling onto the asphalt. Sweaty hair clung to her cheeks. "Mira," she said aloud, remembering five seconds too slow. "Mira!"

"I'm okay." Mira was limping toward her from behind the totaled truck, bleeding fiercely from her forehead and favoring her right leg a little. Like a shadow, the chimera hovered protectively behind her; Wren could see its claw marks on Mira's sweatshirt where it must have grabbed on. "Dodger got me out."

"Good boy," Wren breathed with a sigh of relief. Freak of nature that it was, the thing had probably saved their lives.

"What _was_ that?"

"Doesn't matter right now," Wren was saying grimly, pulling a pistol out of her back pocket and testing the heft in her injured hand before switching to her right with a disgusted sigh. The rain was starting to plaster her hair to her shoulders. "Can you walk? We need to find shelter before anything finds us."

Dodger let out a low, loose growl that cut across the pouring rain, and Wren hesitated to follow his gaze into the forest, where a pair of gleaming red eyes looked back. They reflected light like no animal she'd ever seen before. "Too late," Mira whispered in a strangled voice.

Wren swore, and by then, the chimera had leapt into the undergrowth with a fierce snarl, three-inch claws coming unsheathed mid-jump. "Stay close to me," Wren said in a surprisingly firm voice, pulling Mira in with her uninjured hand before aiming the pistol back at the bushes, which exploded in a cloud of roiling muscle. Wren threw herself and Mira out of the way as Dodger landed back on the street with a fierce snarl, the armored, birdlike talons on his front claws smearing thick, dark blood across the asphalt.

The wolf backed off for a moment, whining as it pulled its weight away from its mangled front leg, and Dodger pulled himself up to his feet. "Look how big its paws are. It's just a cub," Mira was saying absently when Wren shot it in the head. It crumpled to the ground.

Wren swallowed. The size of a large dog, and Mira said it was just a cub. _And_ they had no transport.

Another roar, this one deeper and more ferocious—the cub's growls sounded like pitiful yammering in comparison—rang out as a second wolf leapt out of the forest, legs the size of Wren's covering the distance between the two humans and the chimera in thick, rapid strides.

"Lugalgan," Mira breathed in disbelief. "And it looks like an alpha."

Wren was as ready as she could've been, blinking the rain furiously out of her eyes as she raised the pistol again, but by then Dodger had leapt at the beast and she couldn't get a clear shot.

The wolf beneath him snarled before straightening its wiry, bloodied forelegs and lashing out with all its strength, slamming Dodger to the ground and then bashing the chimera's helmet in with a muscled front paw. Tufts of fur flew in every direction, and then the wolf surged to its feet, first four legs and then two, and it began running in haphazard, hunched steps towards the two humans before it, red fur glinting in the light of the full moon.

Wren's first shot went wild, flying past the matted white fur of the wolf's ear and barely causing it to flinch. Swearing, she lined up the shot again, years of practice echoing in her ears only to be washed away with adrenaline as the crazed wolf pulled up short, flecks of foam flying from its fangs. Wren's second shot caught it in the shoulder, and the momentum sent it staggering back. She fired a third shot, which hit the wolf in the chest, and that was all the time she got before the wolf slammed its legs into the ground and the entire _road_ responded to its command, pillars of stone erupting from nowhere and knocking her ten feet in the air.

Wren hit the ground, hard enough to see stars, and she was blearily trying to focus on the claws running towards her by the time she regained enough understanding to look for her gun.

There was a breath-snatching _whoosh_ of air as Dodger leapt back into the fray, the corded muscle of his back legs tensing as he met the wolf's snapping jaws head on, and then both creatures were on their hind legs, fangs seeking to rip apart the other's neck. The wolf's claws weren't doing much through Dodger's helmet, but they were shredding the tender skin of his underbelly even as Dodger's own talons were slowly turning the wolf's forelegs into ribbons.

In the distance, lightning rumbled, illuminating the entire road, and the wolf threw Dodger down to the ground, rearing back for a killing blow.

Even though every muscle in her body screamed in protest, Wren lined up her fifth shot and fired. The bullet went true, cleanly splitting the wolf's forehead in half and releasing a not-so-clean spray of gurgling blood. Its legs continued to flail, as if unaware that their commander had ceased to exist, and then Dodger let the creature fall back to the ground, slashing its neck open with a quick swipe of his front talons.

"Holy shit," Mira said breathlessly, her eyes wide as she watched the wolf gurgle and finally stop its advance. Dodger gingerly limped back to her outstretched hand, whining in pain.

Wren refused to meet her eyes even as they both squinted against the pouring rain. Her good hand scrambled to reload the bullets in her pistol, even as her mind cemented the conclusion she'd made long ago. They'd barely managed to take out two, but—"There's got to be more. We have to keep moving. There—"

Her breath caught short as half a dozen more gleaming, red eyes blinked open in the forest around them.

* * *

There was a knock at the door. Wren woke up with tears in her eyes.

There was a moment between waking and dreaming where her body was still convinced that it was all real, and then, as she took slow, heaving gulps of air, reality set back in. The other half of the bed was empty and cold. Mira hadn't been there for twelve years.

It hadn't been the first day that hurt the most. It was every day that came after.

* * *

 **.**


	2. orange

**.**

* * *

 **orange**

* * *

"What the fuck do you want?"

Turner felt the retort rise up in his throat like bile, and he swallowed them back down for a moment out of shock. "Wren," he said hoarsely, squinting through the door that was cracked ajar. "You're alive." He'd recognize the rough ease with which she tossed her swears around in a heartbeat.

"The fuck do you want." The second time wasn't a question.

But Turner wasn't focused on her scowl, which he could barely see, or the guarded way that she held most of herself behind the door as if it were her shield, or how she still hadn't unfastened the chain of the deadbolt. There was only the warm feeling of relief rushing through his veins, courage like a suit of armor inspiring his posture to inch a little higher. "They said you'd holed yourself up in here for years, but I'd never pegged you as the city type."

"Turner, I don't want to hear whatever bullshit you've cooked up. Tell me what you want or leave me alone."

He allowed himself a small smile, nervously wiping shocks of ginger hair off of his forehead. "Oh, so you do recognize me."

"Twelve years and a new pair of glasses can't hide the stench of your fake sympathy. You're growing grey, Turner, and I never liked your shit anyway."

The smile faded. Turner ran a hand his hair a little self-consciously. "This is hardly the place for open conversation, Wren. Could I come in?"

"What. The fuck. Do you want." Even through the years, she knew him well enough to recognize that the act of the bumbling idiot was just that: an act.

And, sure enough, the nervous twitch fell out of his fingertips in an instant. His shoulders straightened up, and suddenly he was standing three inches taller. In a low, firm voice, he said, "I have a job."

"What kind of job?" Her voice was guarded, but Turner could sense that he'd piqued her interest somehow. Whether or not that was a good thing was still up in the air.

Turner let himself pause for half a moment, as if he hadn't been rehearsing the white lie on the entire trip over here, trying to figure out the best way to navigate this conversation correctly. It was like trying to shove a camel through a needle. "I need some stuff transported across state. Everyone I talked to said you're still the best."

"Not anymore, and never for you," Wren growled back, turning to push the door shut, but Turner had wedged his foot in the gap and it looked like she didn't have the heart to break it quite yet. "The wilderness has been overrun by ferals for years now. Short of a military convoy, there's no going across."

"There was no one else to go to," Turner hissed back, glancing over his shoulder. He could've sworn that he'd seen a glimpse of movement reflected in the door handle. "There's no one else I can trust with you but this."

"Turner, I'm giving you five seconds to cut the vague pronouns, and then I'm slamming the door in your face."

"Five minutes, Wren, for old time's sake," Turner protested, leaning into the crack in the door and lowering his voice to a low, urgent whisper.

"Old time's sake?" she asked regally, but her voice cracked on the end. "As I recall, that was when you tried to get me shot at the end of my fourth run because it was cheaper to just pay Mira."

Turner scowled. "Not those old times."

"Five minutes, and then I let Dodger on you," Wren hissed back.

At her knees, the chimera growled menacingly, and Turner noticed the chimera for the first time that conversation. "You named your silvady, the giant feral-destroying monster, 'Dodger'?" Turner asked, momentarily distracted by the pair of gleaming golden eyes fixated at him through the crack in the door. "That's pretty fucked up."

" _I_ didn't name him anything," Wren snapped icily.

Time was ticking, and he didn't put it past Wren to stick true to her promise and set the chimera on him, which wouldn't end well. He'd seen what the silvady back in the lab could do to humans, and those had been the ones _with_ obedience training. A pair of loose cannons like this was an entirely different matter; he had no doubt that if Wren pointed, there would be no hesitation. The fact that neither Wren nor the beast had killed each other already was a strange enough miracle. Turner swallowed nervously. "Watari sent me a message."

The door inched a little further shut. "Watari went radio-silent with the rest of San Francisco a long time ago. Once the foxes started breathing ice and the palm trees mutated into twenty-five foot dragons, the place was damned."

Watari had been far too excited when he'd first emailed Turner about his newest discovery, ten years ago that felt like forever. _Kyukon_ , he'd written, _are the first species I've encountered that definitively proves that these mutations give animals direct control over the elements. Their sentience and ability to form complex plans is even more explicitly clear._ Turner had read the message in withdrawn interest, then reread in abject horror, as the live feed played. _They'd captured one of the things and were studying it, trying to domesticate it like Turner's lab had done with their chimeras._ "Apparently not."

"I still get the news, Turner." There was a harsh edge in Wren's voice that he hadn't expected, even from her. Of their original lab group, she had been one of the more receptive to the idea of creating their silvady-chimeras.

But this was nothing like a silvady. The kyukon had been clever—and so had his chimeras—but it had one trait that Turner had envied at first, one trait that all of Watari's research subjects had possessed that all of Turner's had lacked: pragmatism. The kyukon had cooperated at first, responding positively to the basic Pavlovian conditioning they had tried, exhibiting rudimentary but clear signs of obedience. "We never saw for certain," he lied.

"But everyone knows it." Wren's voice was hard. "I wonder what happens to a human heart when it's subjected to temperatures that are a hundred below?"

Turner didn't have to wonder. It had only taken one mistake, one _idiot_ scientist who thought it was safe to open the blast doors when it had feigned injury, and—

"You know I'm right."

Turner sighed. "Watari sent me a message," he tried again. Maybe appealing to her sense of heroism would still work. She used to love that. "And he thinks that I might have the key to solving the obedience issue. We could fix everything."

Wrong answer. Wren shoved the door in a little more, crushing Turner's worn boot beneath it. "I'm done with that bullshit. Watari is probably frozen in a block of ice ten feet thick. The lab is gone. Domesticating them is a lost cause and there's nothing we can do about it. There's no point in trying to befriend the things that are trying to murder us."

Heroism was out. Fine. Turner switched tactics with an ease born only out of decades of practice. "Better than staying holed up in whatever tiny quarantine zones we have left."

"That's someone else's problem. Mi—Watari was always trying to play the explorer, always dragging everyone else down with his hot air, and look where it got us. The world doesn't treat that kind of person very kindly, Turner. You and I know that. You and I survive."

There was something wrong in the way that her voice had caught in the middle of that, and Turner put the pieces together far too late. "Watari's was definitely him. Same encryption keys, same passwords, everything. He says they've been laying low to keep the Skulls off of them, but they've found something huge. And, well," Turner paused, swallowing nervously, "he thinks I have some cargo that might help."

"Cargo?"

"Are you in?" Turner said urgently. "I need to know."

Wren scoffed. "You could hold a gun to my head and I wouldn't take a job into Frisco, Turner. A bullet to the brain would be a kinder death than anything waiting for you down there, Watari be damned."

Turner bit his lip. This was his last chip, and if it was wasted, all of their chances would go down the drain. "I'll give you free transport to anywhere you want to go," he said at last, watching her eyes widen as she processed the ramifications of his trump card. "That's right. You can get out of this town, hell, you can get out of the States altogether. I heard Canada is awfully calm, and their quarantine zones are actually pretty decent—"

"Where the hell are you going to get transportation like that? Civilians haven't had access to international ground travel in years." She sounded uncertain. But she was swaying.

"That's my job. Just do yours." He could see her wavering, the promise of freedom too tempting to refuse. Even after all these years, after all this, there was still that part of her that couldn't stop running. She talked in a loud and boisterous voice about how she only focused on surviving, but Turner new better. But a chance to leave this Feral-infested hellhole, to have more than the fifteen square miles of San Diego's only safe territory—

"What kind of cargo are we talking?"

Turner smiled. "I'll have to show you."

She closed the door in his face.

Turner took a deep, steadying breath and closed his eyes. No. He'd played his cards perfectly.

There was the harsh scraping of the deadbolt chain, and the door opened again, letting Turner see the results of yet another one of the victims of his meddling.

Her pack was slung loosely over one arm, with all the weapons in easy-to-reach holsters that had been worn ragged with use. Her jaw was still confidently turned upright, even after all this time, but he could see the way that her shoulders sagged from more than just the weight of her backpack. There was a fresh bruise under one eye that he could see clearly against her dark skin, but even with the purple blotch and the bags beneath her eyes, nothing would buffer the steely-grey storm of her glare. There were wrinkles that he'd never seen, scars he didn't remember, but this was still the Wren he knew. Exhausted and weather-worn throughout the years, she was defiantly undefeated.

The silvady hung around her back, its yellow-tinged crest flared to life as it glared at Turner with mismatched eyes, and he couldn't help but study it for a moment. There was still a healthy glint in there—some of the chimeras had inherited poor vision from the canine splicing, making them more prone to cataracts—and it regarded him with intense but controlled interest, standing perfectly still as it lasered on to him. No discoloration in the tail that would indicate donor rejection. The talons and wiry forelegs were in excellent condition, sharp curves of muscle bulging out as if chiseled from stone. It had grown since it had left the lab, and now it towered over them both.

A patchwork weapon in a world that had already lost the war, and at her back stood the chimera.

"Thank you for this," Turner said quietly.

Seeing the people he had hurt never got any easier with time. There was a weird sort of feeling they'd all learned to adopt: seeing someone again was never a guarantee. With communication down, nothing was certain. If you left town for a few weeks, there was always the hanging possibility that you would never make it back. Reunions were unexpected and bittersweet; you learned to read between the lines and make assumptions. There had been rumors about Mira, but Turner had never wanted to believe it, never had reason to trust his mind because his heart had so desperately wanted them to be okay.

"It's not for you."

"I know." It wasn't until he saw them now, with the noticeable empty space at her shoulder that made the doorframe feel like a poorly composed picture, that it all became wretchedly clear.

"Show me your cargo. If I don't like it, I'm dipping. If I take it to San Francisco, you better follow through."

Turner hadn't expected anything less.

"I take whatever pays, Turner," Wren said. Scruples were a luxury for a better time. "And Dodger goes after whatever I point him at."

"Well, you've had much better luck than any of the other handlers." Turner began walking, motioning with his head for Wren to follow. "Seattle stopped funding chimera research elevent years ago, almost right after it started."

"No kidding?" Wren kept her voice light and casual even as they walked past a pair of men kicking a limp figure in the alley to their right. "What, you mean you realized that sewing together a couple of nasty zoo animals wouldn't be enough to fight four-foot lightningbugs that literally _summoned lightning_?"

"You were barely out of college when this started, but surely your memory isn't that clouded already," Turner said icily, turning the corner and steering them past a wall plastered with pictures of a leering, blonde haired-man bearing the caption WANTED. SKULL ASSOCIATION. CALL LAW ENFORCEMENT ON SIGHT. "Back when the first mutations started, they looked normal enough. A fox preferred colder temperatures than the rest, or a wolf had fangs that were a little longer than normal. We began the chimeras because we were curious to see if we could replicate those changes artificially, not because we thought they were anything dangerous."

Wren, who had fallen silent at the mention of wolves, brushed a strand of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail behind one ear and absent-mindedly rubbed the frayed, patched elbow of her jacket. "I suppose we should just leave the past behind us," she said in a quieter voice. "It's good to see you in one piece, Turner."

Maybe she could leave the past behind her, but Turner doubted it. Maybe her dreams weren't racked with guilt for sending a close student to her death, but there was the way that she fell silent when she thought he wasn't looking, the way she wilted, that reminded him that other people had nightmares too. "It's good to see you too, Wren." Even if seeing her hurt. "I know you and I were never exactly, ah, close, but for what it's worth, all of us back at the lab were devastated to hear about the accident. I'm glad that you're doing okay." His breath hitched in his throat, and one hand fingered nervously at the frayed edge of his white button-down. "I would never have sent you two out there alone if I'd known what was out there."

Her shoulders sagged down, just a hair, and her voice became dead and quiet. "You said it yourself: it all looked normal enough when it started. We were the first to learn that the redwoods were filled to the brim with wolves with power over stone and enough strength to break a human in half. Someone had to figure it out the hard way."

"Are you doing okay?" Turner asked at last, the concern slipping into his voice. "Is there anyone else with you now? These aren't the kinds of times where you should be alone."

"I'm not alone. I have Dodger."

"Wren, my dear, you know exactly what I mean." No response. A little more nervously, Turner adjusted his glasses and said, "Come back to Seattle with us when this is all blown over. We could always use more hands, and things are finally looking safe."

"No thanks. I've got a pretty big price on my head in the entire state of Oregon; I probably can't live too close. We'll head north."

"But—"

"Like you said," Wren said quietly, the past twelve years slipping into the edges of a voice that left no room for argument, "Canada sounds divine."

He wondered how she saw him, if she knew that he hated himself far more than she could ever hate him. Turner let them walk the last few blocks in silence. San Diego's safe zone was tiny; the feral expansion had encroached on all but the heart of the city before a quarantine had gone up in time. Even now, with nothing more than a couple dozen miles of patrolled chain-link fences that would really never hold, it was only a matter of time before another incident happened and the entire place was overrun like the Bay.

"Through here," Turner said at last, pulling Wren into a side alley and up the rusting steps of a rickety fire escape. He looked around the deserted streets one last time, eyes narrowing as he searched for observers, and then he directed her in through the window—

Wren jerked her head back, narrowly avoiding a collision with a flying rock the size of her face. Dodger snarled, the bristles on his back rising, and his legs tensed as he prepared to lunge.

"Hey!" Turner shouted, suddenly alert. "Vi, calm down. She's with me." He turned back to Wren, who had already produced a pistol from nowhere and was aiming it inside of the house with a cold, steady hand. "Wren, easy. She's a friend."

"You're starting them awfully young," Wren said tightly. She didn't lower the gun, instead choosing to stare at the kid down the barrel. "How old is she? Twelve?"

"Hey, fuck you," the girl who'd apparently thrown the rock snapped, her hands curled in tight fists. "Fifteen, and she's right here. Turner, who is this?"

Turner cut her off. "She's not mine, before you ask," he said hurriedly. "It's a long story. I'm looking out for her for a friend."

Grudgingly, Wren lowered the gun. "Can she be trusted? I thought we were going somewhere safe."

Turner swallowed. This was the tricky part. "She's the cargo."

"Hell no," Wren and the girl said at the same time. "I thought I was going with you!" the girl shouted at Turner, while Wren said in a cold, even voice, "I'm not a babysitter."

"Vi, quiet." His only option was bargaining with Wren: he turned to her with his palms raised. "I know that this isn't anything you've normally done—"

"—no _shit_ —"

"—but she needs to get to San Francisco and the government will never let her cross the checkpoints legally. A convoy isn't an option."

Wren shook her head. Her shoulders had gone rigid again and her arms were firmly crossed. "Get her false paperwork. Bribe someone. Anything. I'm not taking a kid out there. She'll do something dumb and get us both killed."

Gently, gently, lest he scare her away when he was so close. "You and I both know that you can handle the wilderness better than anyone I know."

"Fake flattery isn't going to do you shit," Wren muttered, tucking her pistol back into the waistband of her jeans and clicking to Dodger.

"It's not fake. You really are the best. You got guns into Salem when the entire city was on lockdown after the whole Denjumoku," Turner said, counting the events off on his fingers. "You smuggled a fucking _tiger_ into my lab thirteen years ago, and somehow you carried eight pounds of baked beans through a federal checkpoint wearing only jeans and a long coat. And you made the Kessel run—"

"Luck, a really big truck, a lot of tricks you don't want to know, and parsecs measure distance, not time—and before you say anything else about that, _no_ , if Han had taken the route across the black hole he would've had to have started before the Clone Wars on account of the time dilation," Wren retorted, the steel toes of her boots tapping out a rapidfire pattern on the floor. "And if by some miracle you weren't just pulling stuff out of nowhere: one, those were years ago when I still had a partner, and two, I can't just shove the kid up my ass and pretend like she's not there."

"I'm still right here!"

Turner closed his eyes and kissed his plans goodbye, gently.

"Yeah, and speaking of which, she's got a lot of sass that I'm not going to deal with on the trek to Cisco. Find some other idiot to do your stupid world-saving; I'm out." Wren stormed back toward the window, her dark eyes burning. "Dodger, let's go." She vaulted out the window, rattling the skeleton of the fire escape as she did so. "Dodger."

She sighed wearily, like this had happened before. Turner wasn't surprised; the chimeras were still beasts, after all. But when she turned around to look back at him, it was like the silvady hadn't even heard her: it stood stiffly, forelegs locked in place and webbed tail arched straight out. "Dodger," Wren said softly, and then finally followed its gaze to see what had fixated him so. "Turner, what have you _done_?"

"It's friendly," Turner said quickly, before she could finish the motion she'd started and shot a bullet into it. This was pivotal. This was his last possible trump card: if he could just get her to _see_ what he was talking about, and let her think it was an accident… "And that's why I need you to get her to the lab. That's our cargo. Both of them."

"You maybe could've swayed me on taking the girl, but that's a _feral_ ," Wren snarled, pointing with an unforgiving finger—

She hadn't meant it, but Dodger's eyes swiveled forward and latched on to Vi and her feral with laser precision. Turner, too slow, had half a second that he wasted shouting a warning before the chimera's muscled legs propelled it forward. Talons cut through the air as it made a smooth arc, forelegs outstretched to pounce on the girl.

There wasn't even an exchanging of words. Vi glared back at the incoming chimera, unflinching, and then an iridescent green sphere formed around her, shattering Dodger's charge midway. The chimera's body skidded harmlessly off of the barrier, sparks flying from the five-pointed knurled shell that had served as the shield's source. The creature burbled in an alien language, rocky knots on its surface catching the dim lighting like the inside of a geode.

He saw Wren do the math. The thing was definitely one of the monsters, and it _definitely_ had just intercepted a killing blow for a human.

"Dodger, stand down," she said, and at first Turner wasn't sure if the chimera would listen: it paced around uneasily, front talons and rear claws fully unsheathed as it surveyed the enemy in front of it. "Dodger." The command came more sharply this time, and the chimera reluctantly agreed.

The meteno's actions broke every law Turner knew about this new world: and above all, it chose to protect the girl over itself. That was a level of paradox that he could not rationalize himself through, even now. And that was a level of paradox that he and Watari were willing to stake the rest of their lives, however short, on—if these things could be tamed, if partnership could be achieved, then maybe there would be hope for the rest of them after all.

Maybe Wren didn't see the long-term implications of what this meant. But she, too, understood the same rules that Turner did, and she knew that they were being broken by the feral in front of them. That was why she'd stopped, after all. All that remained was to convince her to take it one step further down the path Turner saw stretching ahead of them. "It helps her," Turner said by means of inadequate explanation. "I wouldn't have believed it either, but it does. It listens to her commands like Dodger listens to you."

"Maia listens _better_ than her silvally listens to her," the girl said, shoving her hands into her back pockets and cocking out her hip as she looked between Wren and Dodger appraisingly, apparently unimpressed. Her feral floated in tight orbit around her head, like a moon around a planet, but she paid it no mind. As if she wasn't even aware that the thing had the power to crush her brains with half a thought.

"My what—no, I'm not even talking to you," Wren began, and then turned her focus back to Turner with an exasperated sigh.

He seized the chance. "What if we could communicate with them? Dodger understands you. The rock understands _her_. This could be the thing that fixes everything."

"This is stupid. It'll fucking kill us all in our sleep."

Turner rolled his eyes, but he knew he'd already won—no one could see _that_ display and not be curious, especially not someone like Wren. "Don't be so dramatic. It hasn't killed me yet. Just get them to San Francisco, and Watari will take care of the rest," Turner said pleadingly. "And then you can be on your way. Washington, Canada, anywhere. I won't bother you again." He hesitated for a moment. "Please, Wren. This could be the key to saving everyone."

"How do we know that this isn't another kyukon?"

Turner had run out of lies a long time ago. His mouth set into a thin line. "We don't."

* * *

 **.**


	3. yellow

**.**

* * *

 **yellow**

* * *

 _Bucket blocks out most sight. Outside is conveyed to him in broad strokes of color; the details are filled in with lines of scent and sound._

Movement in the beyond. Air circulates. It is sharper, somehow, than normal. One scent lingers longer than it should; it cannot be placed. Two pairs footsteps sound instead of one; echoes of steel-tipped feet against steel-clad walls.

 _She bends down to meet his level. The eye contact is foreign to him but he matches it._

Look _._

 _In her he sees Silver metal like the hard glint in her eyes, like the steel bars she slides open without hesitation. In her he sees a mirror._

 _One hand outstretches toward him, an invitation; unconsciously, one gnarled, mismatched foreleg does the same._

 _Reflection._

 _Master._

* * *

This was what Dodger remembered when the checkpoint turrets turned their sights toward Wren and the girl and unleashed a maelstrom of bullets.

There was a brief moment of clumsy calculation as alarm flooded through him like electric current— _bullets-travel-half-mile-in-heartbeat; they will not react fast enough_ —and then he summoned the memory and leaped. The transformation raced across his body like a wildfire; tufts of fur turned to hardened steel exoskeleton starting from his crest and rippling down to his tail, just fast enough, so that by the time the lead storm made contact, it was ricocheting off of his iron armor and harmlessly into the dust.

* * *

 _Master and Second are yelling at each other. He does not know why. They chatter many words in rapid-fire with meanings and sounds that he cannot comprehend; words echo around in bucket until they all become muffled and wooden._

 _Second points a finger at him like a weapon. Even with the bars of his cage between them he feels threatened and quails against the rage in her voice._

 _Master fires back. Words uncharacteristically fierce. He watches with admiration. Usually around Second she is gentle and soft and uses the same tone of voice that she uses with him. But here she is firm and decisive. She fights._

 _They blur together. A third person with green eyes hair comes down the stairs, grumbling at something, and pulls up short when he sees the three of them. His face contorts into a tight knot that cannot be unfurled. Second snaps something and Master coldly retorts._

 _Master stands like alpha. She turns away from Second and Green and says words to him that are slow and clear._ DODGER-SIT-STAY.

 _He remembers this. They practiced it and when he does a good job she gives him round snacks that are sweet like green-eyes used to. He knows that these are_ words _but they have meaning. It is complicated but he will try his best._

 _He sits and stays._

 _Master reaches for the door. Second and Green reach for her but they are too slow; his cage slides open before they can stop her. Second's shouts disappear and her mouth sets into a thin crease and she pulls a bang-stick out and points it at him but he sits and stays._

 _The air must be thick if he can feel it freezing him in place._

 _Second pockets her bang-stick, snarls something at Master, and leaves._

 _Green hesitates for a minute and then runs after her._

 _Master stays with him. Feeds round snack. Pets his head gently and looks into his eyes so he can see how much she means it._

DODGER-word-word-word-word.

* * *

This was what Dodger remembered he jolted awake to the sound of shouting and found Wren already kneeing one of the bandits in the gut and redirecting his wrist so that his bullets dug into the ground.

He allowed the memory of fighting to overtake him as he leapt over the sleeping form of the girl by the smoldering campfire, tasting steel, rage and power flooding the corded muscles of his rear legs as he kicked one of them into a tree while slashing open the face of the third.

* * *

 _He doesn't hear the Pack tonight._

 _The Pack is full of pups that attacked Master and dented his bucket and bit at his heels, in the junction between foot and leg where two fleshes meet. The Pack comes back each time stronger—once they were small, with tiny rings of fur around their collars and pitiful roars; now have a hardening ruffs that preclude something stony, something more feral. For now he is strong enough. They are many but he is mighty. They sense weakness there and do not find it, not yet, not when he is still strong._

 _He dislikes the Pack._

 _Sharpness pierces his side, accompanied with the needle-like smell of antiseptics. Nostrils flare wildly in response to familiar but hated scent. He grits his teeth and chokes back a snarl when he remembers that the sharpness and the reek comes from Master. She whispers words to him. He does not understand them, but he senses the comfort; he allows one hand to be placed on his scarred flank while the other causes more sharp pain. One leg spasms involuntarily. Bucket hides the way his mouth roils with discomfort. She dabs at the bitemarks in his side with practiced care. The stinging liquid on the cloth in her hand mixes with his blood until they are both wearing it._

 _Master chatters words to Second. They exchange words. He hears his name but it is not addressed to him so he ignores it. More words are exchanged in a rapid-fire string. He understands two of them. DOGER. COLD. Second grumbles and then busies herself pulling objects from Truck._

 _Master is wise to find safe place for them to stop away from Pack. Truck is well-protected inside of large webs of metal that two-legs kept around city. Metal webs and city are both abandoned, but the Pack cannot find entrance here. It is just Master and Second and Truck and him, and he knows to defend them in that order._

 _Second does not seem to like him very much. He does not blame her. He does not like Second very much either; that is why she is Second. But Master likes Second, so he will tolerate her until he is told otherwise._

 _Master whispers soothing words._ word-WILL-HURT-DODGER _, he recognizes her say in warning, and then he hears her sharp intake of breath as she steels herself and begins stitching him back together._

 _Something about that breath makes it better. Like it pains her to hurt him like this, like she has to do it for a reason. He does not understand the reason but if she must brace herself for it, then he believes in her resolve._

 _Second swears something in agitation and kicks at the pile of wood she gathered, and then she recoils suddenly as it spurts to life with crackling warmth._

 _His nostrils widen in alarm and he almost bolts—memories of the spiked fire-turtles from the hotlands, with breath that sent his bucket into flames—but Master laughs and claps her hands. Fire is under their control somehow. He did not catch the full meaning of their conversation_ , _but now he understands the gist._

 _Master ordered this fire to be made for_ him _._

 _That warms him more than the flames do._

DODGER-word-word-GOOD-word.

* * *

This was what Dodger remembered when a pair of a pair of enormous, spike-encrusted moles erupted from the grass beneath them, steely-tipped claws glinting in the light of Wren's flashlight as they turned the gravel to frost and prepared to fight.

"Dodger, we need fire!" Bullets launched out of Wren's pistol toward the attackers' eyes, Wren roughly shoved the girl behind her and out of the way of the fighting, and Dodger let the warmth of the memory consume him until he and it and the tunnel went up in flames.

* * *

 _He likes the smell of pine._

 _Needles sprout against the pads of his rear feet, but he enjoys the way they crunch. The brown ones make a nice sound; the green ones smell like air and tree and_ life _._

 _Master says words in the tone of voice that is meant for him, and he rubs affectionately up against her arm. She must be growing shorter; he nearly reaches her shoulder._

 _Second mutters something that he cannot catch, let alone begin deciphering into words and not-words. Master brightens, in a way that makes her teeth dazzling in the afternoon sun that filters blurrily through the trees. She shuffles through the undergrowth with her feet, the sound of underbrush rustling filling their ears, and then she selects a large stick._ Word _, she says_.

 _He does not understand._

Word _, she repeats again._ DODGER-word. _She said his name so it must be important_.

 _Master throws the stick._

 _He tilts his head and stares after it._

Word-DODGER.

 _She points at the stick._

Word-DODGER.

 _Unsure._

Word.

 _He gets the stick._

 _Master breaks out into uproarious laughter and claps her hand for him._ GOOD-DODGER, _she says._ VERY-GOOD-DODGER _. He races back to her; her joy is infectious and it feels like he has wings. Pine needles flatten under his approach and rear-fin is shaking out of control but he does not mind. It is like he is pouncing the whole way back to her._

Word. _Master takes the stick and then repeats herself. Word solidifies._ FETCH-DODGER. _She throws the stick again._

 _Dodger stops for a moment as the paradox hits him. Why does she want the stick and then tosses it away? He almost believes that she threw it by accident, but Master does not do things by accident._

 _Unsure._

 _He gets the stick._

 _Second is staring at him in open-mouthed disbelief but he ignores her and prances back to Master with stick. This time, he does not give her the stick right away. She will probably throw it again and then regret it and he does not want her to have to regret anything._

 _But Master is smarter than he is and reaches into her pocket for round-sweet-treats-with-hole._

CHEERIO.

 _Dodger drops the stick._

DODGER-word-word-GOOD-BOY.

* * *

This was what Dodger remembered when they finally gave in to their fight for exhaustion for the day, made camp, and Wren dug her water bottle out of her nearly-empty backpack with a sigh of disgust, her tension written all over her face. The girl and her floating rock-that-was-not-an-enemy looked stood in the center of the clearing, arms folded and glowering with emotions Dodger could not read.

He allowed the crisp scent of the memory of grass to alter his core. The sprout started slowly but gained speed; the stem erupted into leaves and then bloom and then fruit, and he tore one off and threw it to Wren.

* * *

 _He grips the riverbed hard enough to tear thick gouges in the rocky surface. Scent and smell are lost here; lashing rain makes it almost impossible to see—_

 _Second splutters and surfaces. She is a mismatch of features that don't quite form a complete human to him. Black hair plastered to her face, volume lost. Eyes frantic. Blood worn across her forehead like a second skin, so thick that the rain cannot begin washing her clean._

 _Howls behind him, sharp and piercing, threatening to dominate his other senses and blot out the image of Second drowning in the summer storm. Vengeance, fight, destroy. It is in his blood, in his thoughts, in his_ purpose _. He seeks out the monsters and ravages them; this is what he was stitched into being to be. They had already hurt each other so much. This fight is almost done._

 _There is a moment of overwhelming_ loss _, tumultuous like the rising tides into which Second threw herself and which now threaten to consume her even as the wave of grief threatens to devour him as well. The stitched scar in his side aches; he will never feel pain in that way again._

 _He closes his aching eyes and tries to hear the words that Master cannot speak for him, what she would have said. She always knows what to do but now—_

 _The first of the Pack explodes out of the woods. They are larger than he remembered; they sought weakness in him and they found it. Fur mottled with red, damp against downpour. Damp air reeks with blood. He yowls a challenge; one roars something back while other bashes bucket in with thick swipe of paw. Wood splinters and he keens in pain, the scent of his own blood thickening._

 _Pain rushes in alongside the electric surge of adrenaline._

 _He remembers a storm like this. A storm with a better time. The storm had a better time because it had—_

 _The bucket shatters in an explosion of color as he unfurls for the first time, weary power crashing through his limbs like lightning. He rears back and howls, swiping foes back into the woods with both forelegs and a blast of newfound strength. One flees back into the forest. The other leaps back toward him, snarling and a tangle of rock-hard fur. He breaks it in half._

 _More erupt from the trees. The stones around the riverbank rise in response to one's call. He rips off its arm with newly-freed jaws and throws the offending limb back at its owner, bowling over two more of the Pack while another leaps at his throat._

 _That was their fatal error. When it is this close to him, jaws fastening around his neck like a collar, there is no mistaking her scent on its breath. He roars, and the thunder answers his call. Yellow eyes shoot open; a bolt of lightning explodes from him; they are all blown from him like leaves in the storm._

 _The ones that get up flee to the forest. He makes a move to pursue them and then stops, wrestling with his instinct. Second still has not surfaced from the water._

 _Hesitation. The bloodlust screams for him to kill-them-all._

 _But five_ words _fill his memories, in her voice, and they are louder. He jumps into the river._

 _Fingers lace into his waterlogged fur and around his neck, holding him tight. If he does not look back he can imagine, for a moment, that he is saving_ her _instead of Second, that it is her voice breathing into his ear. But Master is not there to speak the words that he hears._

DODGER-word-A-GOOD-BOY.

* * *

This was what Dodger remembered when they reached the river and the girl blurted, "I can't swim."

He didn't know the words, but even if he had, he wouldn't have told the girl Wren's secret—that Wren also couldn't swim, not any more. Instead, he kneaded the grass beneath them with his talons and then rolled his shoulders, allowing the amphibious skin to swell upward from his finned tail alongside the memory of rushing water, while the ghost of a sad smile rippled across Wren's face.

* * *

 _Second has barely moved since they got back. Sometimes she gets up to replace her glass bottle when it runs dry. Sometimes she remembers to feed him. Most of the time she stares at the wall without moving like when Master told him to_ SIT-DODGER-SIT _._

 _But Second is much better at Sitting than he is. He used to get distracted by cheerios and interesting smells and Master never made him wait this long. Second sits on the couch and glares at her empty bed as if it is the reason behind all of their problems._

 _He dozes fitfully in the corner. Normally Master does not keep him in the house and he is taken back to his steel-home so it takes a few tries to figure out which corner is the best corner. He likes the one beside her bed because it has the most scent of her left on it. But even that begins to fade and still Second has not moved._

 _When the scent fades completely he finds himself inching his spot closer and closer to Second, starved as he is for contact._

 _One day she jerks as if shocked by lightning. Her eyes are red-rimmed and dry as she mechanically turns to look at him._ DODGER-GO.

 _His head snakes up. He tilts to one side, studying her. She is not Master. He does not take her commands._

DODGER-GO.

 _He sits and stays._

SHE-IS-NOT-COMING-BACK.

 _He hisses at her._

 _She throws him a cheerio and he does not catch it out of sheer surprise. It bounces off of his face and hits the wooden floor. He stares at it for a moment, perplexed, and then pecks it up._

 _It tastes like the same cheerio. Very interesting._

 _Second throws one at the door. Tilts her head toward it to indicate direction, like she normally does._ DODGER-GO.

 _He sits and stays._

 _There is raw fury in her voice, but it is mixed with hurt as well, different from the time he watched Master and her and Green fight in front of him._ YOU-AND-ME-word-word-MONSTERS-word-word-AND-SHE IS NOT COMING BACK. _She devolves into a deluge of words, and then:_ DODGER-GO.

 _He sits and stays._

 _Second's body shakes with great, heaving breaths._ WHATTHEFUCK-IS-WRONG-WITH-YOU.

 _Blink._

WHY.

 _Blink._

 _Something inside of her breaks more than it already was. The fire dies out and her eyes glaze over. She slumps to the side. Glass bottle hits the ground and rolls under the couch._

 _When she wakes up hours later her eyes fly to his spot in the corner, which has migrated through the weeks until it is almost at her side. He has not moved today. She looks at him. He looks back._

 _One hand stretches toward him, an invitation. Drops down and pets his crest a little too roughly. Second's raspy voice speaks with Master's words._

DODGER-IS-A-GOOD-BOY.

* * *

This was what Dodger remembered when the fences rose up around them and it looked like the way was impassable.

He let the memory fill him, the memory of the ghost of a girl and the dead girl she loved, and for a moment he turned incorporeal, so light and hazy that he almost floated away before he landed on the inside and nudged the door open.

* * *

 _On sunny days he reminds himself of the storm._

 _It starts when Master leads him to the set of stairs he has never been allowed to climb before. Forbidden. This much is ingrained in his muscles with repeated punishments to back it up: he cannot touch these stairs no matter what._

 _Master makes sounds with her mouth that do not sound angry, and he tries to puzzle over her communication._

 _They climb up the stairs together; her hand shakes as it holds on to his chain with a thick glove that he knows he cannot bite through but he does not try. Master pushes open the door at the top and a blast of wind and light hits him in the face, so hard that he snarls at it because surely it must be attacking them both._

 _Master makes more sounds with her mouth._

 _The unfamiliar scents hit him then, so sharp they nearly overwhelm him. The ground is covered in green and the sky in grey; the hues are so saturated that he can see the smudges even through head-covering. Water falls from the sky, makes the dirt smell so much richer than dirt._

 _Master repeats one sound more than the others like it is aimed at him. She lets his chain fall out of her hand but he does not run from her. They sit there as the water continues to fall and she lets him watch, and forever intertwines her scent with the smell of the summer storm._

DODGER.

* * *

This was what Dodger remembered most of the time. In his mind, Master was painted in thick bursts of yellow, the only color bright enough to match her exuberance and joy. She lives in real-time in the memories that made him who he was, a recording on a disc that he plays over and over again,

They settled down for the night on the third story of an abandoned building. The falling star hovered around the girl, its mottled surface trailing glitters that belied the warped exterior, and they slowly settled into slumber. Wren propped herself up on the windowsill, keeping uneasy watch over the broken ghosttown of crumbled cityscape and twisted steel around them. One hand strayed to pick at the elbow of her jacket, and she shivered despite the warmth of the night air.

Dodger threaded his way under her limp arm and _remembered_ the feel of her current, allowing the tingling warmth of the memory to press up against Wren's resistance. She idly scratches the feathers on the side of his head. Together, they watched the night in silence, waiting for the sun to peer out of the clouds of a storm that had run dry years ago.

"Good boy, Dodger."

* * *

 **.**


	4. green

.

* * *

"Gladion."

"Who the fuck are you and how did you get up here?" The man named Gladion looked archly up from his desk full of paperwork. He tried not to show it, but his heart was racing. It had been a long, long time since something had last gotten the jump on him, and it hadn't ended that well for him last time. He pretended to use one hand to massage his temple—best to keep them distracted, so they wouldn't notice that his right hand was reaching into the drawer beside his desk—and tried to study his assailant in the meantime, eagle-eyed for any sign that his actions were being noticed.

She looked like she was twelve.

Age started meaning a lot less these days; people didn't grow old, so they grew up. The kid still had freckles smattered across her face, but stress and hunger had already turned her cheeks lean and sharp, like the rest of them. Her hair was cut close to her ears, rough, like it had been done hastily and with clumsy hands. But beneath the shocks of dark hair, Gladion was drawn to the girl's eyes for two reasons: firstly, because they held a peculiar kind of fire in them, and secondly, because they were a vibrant, unnatural shade of purple, like the center of a nebula.

"Doesn't matter," she said curtly, striding toward him and keeping the gun in her hand pointed levelly at his forehead. "I heard that you worked for Aether Labs before you went balls-deep in Skull business. I want to talk about that. Hands on the table."

Gladion raised one eyebrow and slowly removed his empty hand from the desk. No need to escalate the situation yet. "This is hardly the venue for polite conversation." He made a point to stare, cross-eyed, at the muzzle in front of his face as if it scared him, but in reality he was studying her grip on the pistol. Her knuckles were white around the grip but her index finger floated off the trigger. Her fingers were bunched in the wrong way, and she held it in one hand, feet planted, head tilted off to one side so she could still stare at him with those strange, purple eyes.

Conclusion: she had no idea what it meant to use one of those.

"I just have to ask a few questions and then I'm—"

He whipped his right hand up and wrapped his fingers around her bony wrist, _twisting_ more so than pushing her hand out of the way. Her arm wrenched sideways and he felt the crack of bone beneath his fingers as she screamed and dropped the gun. Gladion surged forward, sweeping the gun up in his free hand and pinning her arm to his desk. "Look, kid," he growled in her ear. "Calm down and I'll let you keep your other wrist intact."

"Power Gem," she croaked.

"Power _what the fuck_ —"

Blasts of stone whizzed past his face, almost separating his nose from his mouth as they tore the words off of his lips. Gladion swore and took a step backward as a fucking _feral_ floated up behind the girl. Demonic, pale eyes peered out from beneath a mottled shell that was twisted shut like an enormous walnut. It chirped at him indignantly, bluish energy trailing around it, and then it hurled another barrage of stone at his face that he barely managed to dodge. Slivers of stone quivered as they buried themselves one by one in the wall right behind his head.

"Stop or I shoot!" Gladion roared, raising his gun and aiming it at the girl. He wasn't really sure which one he was talking to—the girl or the monster—but at this point it didn't matter.

They froze, which was stupid of them, but they hadn't yet stood down, which was even stupider. "You broke my wrist!" the girl shouted back. Her eyes were alight with flame, the kind of righteous fury he'd only expected out of children.

"Keep trying to pull shit," Gladion said tightly, still aiming the gun with both hands at her chest, "and that'll be the least of your problems, I promise you." Maybe she wouldn't understand the body language, the way that his fingers hovered over the trigger; or how his gaze kept darting between her, the target, or the feral behind her, the threat. But he hoped that she could see the determination etched in every line on his face, burning there clearly enough that she'd at least think twice. He hadn't become the leader of an underground resistance syndicate purely by paperwork. "I don't want to shoot a kid, you look awfully young to be a murderer, and apparently I know something you want, so let's both just take a deep breath here."

A moment passed. "Maia." The girl's voice was curt. "Back off for now."

"Smart."

Her face contorted. "Drop the gun and we'll talk."

Gladion made a point to stare at the feral that floated behind her. "You're staying armed, so I am too." He sat down on the edge of his desk and took a moment to mull over his options. The thing was _fast_ , faster than he could reasonably hope to react, and like any feral, it could probably kill him easily if it got the drop on him. It listened to her, though, and that was an interesting matter enough. Perhaps they both had something the other wanted. "Anyway, my name is Gladion, but I think you know that already."

"Fuck off and drop the gun."

"The polite response," Gladion responded testily, making a point to gesture a little with the gun to punctuate his words, "is to _introduce_ yourself. Kids these days, I swear." He raised one eyebrow as her lips seethed with frustration. "You made the mistake of telling me that I've got something that you want, so no matter what you and your feral rock-monster think, things are going on _my_ terms now."

She glowered back at him, and he wondered for a moment if he'd taken things too far with that last jab. "Vi," the girl said at last, pointing to herself, and then she jerked one finger toward the gnarled feral that orbited her head incessantly. "The minior is Maia."

 _Minior_. He hadn't heard that one before. "Okay," Gladion said, smiling weakly. And then, even though the act made set every instinct he had screaming and on edge, he pointed the gun upward and then lowered it to the table. Within arm's reach, probably fast enough to grab before the feral launched itself at him, but he had a hunch that Vi wouldn't try anything. He'd seen her type before. Most kids were just as confused as the rest of them. "So you're twelve—"

" _Fifteen,_ fuck you."

Ah, so she liked his humor. "And travelling the world with a creature that could kill us all in a heartbeat. That's quite a story, isn't it? Have a seat; I honestly won't bite."

You couldn't really _blame_ kids like her, honestly. Gladion could remember a time before the world had ended, but the details were starting to get hazy. There were flashes of what life was before, but what he remembered the most of an abruptly-ended childhood was clutching his sister close to him, her blonde hair smeared against his chin as the beach around them erupted into monstrous, yawning caverns, spewing sand as castle walls rose up around them and threatened to devour them whole.

And now, years later, there was still that same hollow sense, the feeling that he was still just a kid up to his ankles in wet sand, trying to avoid being swallowed alive. He'd always wondered which of them had gotten out of it the worst—or if they'd all just crawled free, ghostly shells of their former selves, sandy grime all that concealed the ghastly void beneath.

And _he_ at least had the times before to fall back on, memories of bunk beds and shared popsicles and riding in a red wagon with one rickety wheel—but kids like her?

"I don't need your sympathy. You studied alternate dimensions under Aether Labs, but you never published. Tell me what you figured out."

A world like hers didn't have time for bunk beds and popsicles, and at this rate, it never would. That thought alone had always been enough to make Gladion stop and reconsider.

"I stopped studying after—wait, no I never made that research common knowledge," Gladion said quietly. "Who have you been talking to?" Turner, piece of shit that he was, had probably squealed under pressure, but it was good to figure out who he could trust.

"Doesn't matter. How do I open a wormhole?"

"You don't," Gladion responded reflexively before he had a chance to even think about the ramifications of her question, and then the _absurdity_ of this situation slowly sank back to him.

"Why not?"

Gladion sighed, taking a moment to furtively glance at her and the strange feral that seemed to _listen_ to her. Watari would've cut off both hands for a specimen like that. "Do you know why there's a burn mark fifty miles long across the state of Oregon? Even if we had the power to open it, we'd have no way of controlling where it would lead, and we certainly couldn't fight what was on the other side."

There was no mistaking the way that they both tensed, the girl and the feral alike, as if he'd said something they didn't agree with. "Maia and I can handle ourselves."

In another time and place, Gladion would've been impressed with this edgy kid who'd managed to make it this far with a tame _meteor_ , but he didn't have that luxury any more. There was something familiar about the grit in her eyes, though. "The last time a wormhole opened, the monster that landed over Portland devoured the electrical grid and killed over three hundred thousand people in the first hour alone. I don't think you can handle that."

"There are four more like that coming."

She said it with such nonchalance that it was hard to pick up on how easily she discussed the end of the human race. "How can you possibly know that?"

"They always come in the same order. There's, uh—" Vi got flustered for a moment, her brow creasing with uncharacteristic discomfort, and then she continued, "You've had the purple one with all the toxins, the red one with huge muscles that smashes things, the white one that runs super fast and isn't governed by momentum, and the electric one that zaps things."

"Purple one?" Gladion asked.

But she didn't seem to hear him. "The next one will burn your seas, and the one after that will cut your survivors to shreds," she said, and it was then that Gladion realized why he'd been so drawn to her eyes: they were decades older than the rest of her. "And, when the seventh one comes, it will devour anything left, and all life on this world will end."

Gladion laughed weakly. "A bit dire, aren't we?"

Her rock chirped her frustration for her as Vi said, "It's happened before. You need to stop them before the seventh comes."

Gladion did a quick mental count. They'd only seen three so far. The purple one wasn't one that he'd had record of, and given the trails of destruction that wormholes tended to cause, it wasn't exactly like its arrival could've been kept secret. There was a thud downstairs. Gladion paused and pretended not to notice, and then said carefully, "You've seen this before, haven't you?"

Her lip quivered. Vi nodded.

The sounds resolved themselves into screaming, muffled enough that it was probably coming from the lower floors. Gladion sighed pointedly and looked at Vi with one eyebrow raised. The message was clear enough. _Now what_.

"I didn't think she'd come looking here." Vi bit her lip and looked almost scared.

"She's looking? For you? Hitman or bodyguard?"

"Bodyguard, I guess."

Damn. A hitman at least wouldn't be upset that he broke the girl's wrist, but—

There was a bloodcurdling roar downstairs, one that sounded like every animal and no animal at all, and Gladion pulled up short. "Who's your bodyguard." His voice dropped two octaves. "They've got to be good if you managed to get you this far."

"That's not important," Vi said, also leaning forward. "Tell me what you know before they get here and we'll be fine."

The screech of shearing steel carried through the concrete floors. By the sound of it, something had just ripped the elevator doors open, and they were getting closer. "No, it _really_ is."

"I—"

There wasn't time to apologize. Gladion grabbed the girl's thin frame in one hand and held her roughly in front of him, lining the muzzle of the pistol against her scalp. The fucking feral chirped at him indignantly, but he ignored it. "The safety is on and I have absolutely no intention of shooting you," he said in a low voice as the ungodly screeching got closer, "but her first instinct when she gets through those doors is going to be to kill me, and she tends to get what she wants. If you want me to leave this conversation with enough skin on my skull to tell you what I know, you'll be a good hostage and hold still, and you'll tell your demon-rock to do the same."

"You think _holding a gun to my head—_ "

The door leapt off of its hinges and landed in a crumpled heap against the wall. Gladion swallowed as, six feet off the ground, yellow eyes glinted at him from the darkness before the chimera stepped forward. Look in the eyes and don't back down. The curved beak and talons were flecked with _something_ vaguely blood-colored, and its forelegs tensed as it prepared to leap at him, but a gloved arm held it back. The other hand held a pistol and, even with the one-handed grip, looked like it new _exactly_ what it was doing. "You have something that belongs to me."

"You were never one to share your toys, Wren," he responded with icy calm. "And if I recall correctly, you stole my chimera."

She didn't flinch or even act surprised to see him. "Let her go. Even if you shoot her, Dodger will flay you alive."

"You named him _Dodger_?" Gladion almost lost the tough act right there.

"Fuck off. Wasn't my idea."

"Boo wouldn't actually flay me alive, would he?" Gladion peered around Vi's head casually, trying to get a gauge on the silvady. The chimera had grown _massively_ since they'd parted ways, but he seemed to deflate a little under Gladion's gaze. "Boo remembers his cheerio treats from Gladion, right?"

The silvady, who had been anxiously shifting his weight back and forth between his front paws in a movement Gladion could only describe as _tippy-tapping_ , except from a giant, base-slaughtering scientific monstrosity, whined in dismay. Wren cut him off with a sharp hiss, and the silvady looked away guiltily. "Fat load of help you are," she muttered, and then fixed her gaze back to Gladion. "Let the kid go."

Vi hissed.

"Put the gun down or I shoot her," Gladion drawled, which shut them both up. "You'll lose out on whatever price was high enough to get you out of hiding."

"Gladion, I got five hundred bucks off of you last time we played poker. Your bluff hasn't improved since then. You value your own skin too much to pull the trigger."

"Speaking of valuing skin, I do hope you two didn't kill any of my people trying to get up here. You of all people should know how hard it is to find hired help these days."

Wren rolled her eyes. "Don't worry; your gang of kids is just as fearsome as everyone says. Scouts on the first floor fled the second they saw Dodger, and were kind enough to give me directions to you while they turned tail like kicked puppies."

Gladion sighed. That happened more frequently than he cared to admit. This was why you didn't recruit children in this game—no matter how fast they had to grow up, it was never fast enough. He'd always been a sucker for sob stories, and it wasn't hard to see his face on the eyes of every orphan on the streets. At least they'd run; he knew that the silvady was a living blender when confronted. "Thanks."

Pause.

"I promise I won't shoot you if you stop holding a gun to her head," Wren said at last, nodding her chin in Vi's direction.

"Noted," Gladion said, and let his arm fall. Vi took a step away from him, but she didn't run towards Wren, which told Gladion all he needed to know.

Wren broke the silence with the question that had probably been burning on her tongue for a while. "I'm sorry for leaving you to the police, but you didn't tell me that you were fleeing the scene of a _bioterrorism attack_ when you asked for a ride."

Ah, yes. The elephant in the room. "It _technically_ wasn't bioterrorism."

"Your mother opened a wormhole that dropped Denjumoku on top of the settlement in Portland."

Vi's eyes narrowed, and she looked back at Gladion. "Denjumoku. Is that the purple one?"

Wren answered before he had the chance. It seemed like this was a common practice for them. "Black and white, lotta arms, shoots electricity."

Vi nodded, apparently satisfied, and then said the utterly sassy remark that Gladion wouldn't have dared mention: "If it wasn't toxic, I don't think it counts as bioterr—"

"The Portland settlement contained four hundred thousand people."

All three of them fell silent. Wren's past tense told Vi the information that Gladion already knew.

When both of them looked at them, it was easy enough to see how they viewed him.

"I should've told you about the wormhole." Gladion shifted his weight uneasily. "I was trying to keep you safe by letting you know as little as possible. You would've done the same."

"You don't know that."

He raised one eyebrow.

Wren glowered. "You don't have to pretend to look out for me."

Gladion wondered if she saw the absurdity as readily as he did. Over the years, he'd come to understand that Wren had learned to see the world precisely how she personally needed to, and that skill had kept her alive. "We got out okay."

"Dodger ripped apart a military compound, and I'm pretty I'll be executed if I set foot in the state of Oregon ever again. Turner invited me to Seattle and I didn't quite have the heart to tell him why I had to say no."

"My mother got swallowed into an alternate dimension, my research was ruined forever, and I became the most senior surviving member of the only resistance group to the military police." Gladion honestly felt bad for people who tried to enter pity contests with him; even in this day and age, he tended to win.

"You hated her more than anyone, your research is _very_ much ongoing, and you tuned that resistance group into an orphanage for every lost child you see on the street," Wren retorted dryly. For the first time in this conversation, her gaze slid over to Vi. "At least, your research is good enough to convince teenagers that you're the leading expert on wormholes."

Part of him hated how easily she was able to push his buttons. She'd learned far too much from Turner.

"You knew I was coming here?" Vi asked in a strangled voice.

"You weren't very hard to track," Wren snapped back. "And if you pull this shit again, I swear I will break your legs. Dodger can carry you the rest of the way."

The other part of him was trying not to remember that, for every homeless kid he gave a job to, there were a dozen more dead because he hadn't stopped Lusamine before—

"Is she yours?" Gladion said instead, changing the subject and motioning to Vi.

"A friend's."

"And the feral?" He wasn't even sure why he asked.

"Hers." Pause. "I can't tell you why it listens to her, either. Turner has no clue. That's why he's got me escorting her to Watari." He could almost taste the irritation in her voice—was it because she had to admit she didn't know something, or because she had to admit she was helping Turner?

Gladion settled for the more pressing stuff—her systematic prophecy that they were all going to die. "She's seen some crazy shit."

Of all things, _that_ was what made Wren do a double-take. "She talks to you? I thought she was as mute as her rock."

"Fuck off," Vi said.

"Besides the sailor's mouth," Wren muttered. Dour as ever. "We get plenty of that."

Gladion sighed and let the gun drift downward again. "You're right," he said, not missing the way that Vi's eyes glinted with determination "I did open a wormhole. That's actually how Turner, Wren, and I parted ways. Your friends had very different approaches to saving the world than I did."

The silvady bristled on Wren's behalf, and Gladion took a step back. Best not to toe the line when it was etched on thin ice.

"So you want to open another wormhole," Gladion continued conversationally, and Wren glared daggers at him. "The short version. You can't."

Vi was bristling at him too, all over her tiny frame. " _I_ can't?"

"No one can. Not just because it's dangerous and giant monsters lurk on the other side," Gladion added hastily, before she could call him a coward again. "You need energy of an _enormous_ magnitude, the kind of stuff you only see on distant stars. It doesn't even make sense how much or what kind; we hadn't been able to generate anything like it before the accident and we haven't been able to replicate it since."

"Energy?" Vi asked at the same time that Wren asked, "Accident?"

He answered Wren first, for old times' sake. "Denjumoku was an accident. Or, well, the wormhole that summoned it was. We hadn't expected it to work. We weren't even running any of the equipment at the time. We'd just been gathering data when there was this brilliant streak of purple light appeared. And there was this cloud. This strange, weird, glowing cloud—"

Wren snorted. She wasn't even trying to hide her disbelief.

Gladion knew. No one had believed his story, but if Vi was the kind of kid who had tamed a feral and ran around with all of her headstrong stupidity, maybe, just maybe, he had a chance here. "It was like nothing we'd ever seen before on the sensors. It had two little blobs that orbited around this core full of _unfathomable_ composition, and it was focused on my mother for a moment before it showed us a glimpse of this faraway world, and then it just—"

"You actually did it," Vi said quietly, her disbelief twisting into a blade that she used to cut through the conversation. "You summoned Cosmog."

He and Wren flinched simultaneously. "That name is _heavily_ classified," Gladion said.

Vi glared back at him, eyebrows furrowed across her narrow forehead. "We know more than you fucks do about most of this, so if you could stop playing coy with the information, maybe we can all get out of this alive." And then, quieter, to the chunk of rock next to her, "At least they didn't give their weirdass names to _everything_ they found here."

"Why do you want to open a wormhole?" Wren was talking to the girl for the first time since they'd all entered the room together.

But it was Gladion who answered her. One glance at Vi's stricken face told him enough about how the kid felt. He almost felt bad—Wren had spent so much time with her chimera that she'd forgotten what it meant to talk to real humans. But the signs were written all over Vi's face, the same kind of signs he'd seen on every kid in this hell, except—"Can't you tell, Wren? She wants to go home."

* * *

 **.**


End file.
